Dana L. Robert

Dana RobertDr. Robert is William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor, and Director of the Center for Global Christianity and Mission. Her research and teaching interests span mission history, World Christianity, and mission theology. She is a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2017, she received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society of Missiology. An Editor of the journal Church History, she has been a Henry Luce III Fellow in Theology, and Senior Research Fellow at the Leibniz Institute of European History in Mainz, Germany. Her books include Faithful Friendships: Embracing Diversity in Christian Community (2019); African Christian Biography: Stories, Lives, and Challenges (2018); Joy to the World!: Mission in the Age of Global Christianity (2010); Christian Mission: How Christianity Became a World Religion (2009); Converting Colonialism: Visions and Realities in Mission History, 1706-1914 (2008); Christianity: A Social and Cultural History (co-author, 1997), and the now classic American Women in Mission: A Social History of Their Thought and Practice (1997). She is on the Editorial Committee for the award-winning digital humanities project Dictionary of African Christian Biography and the Journal of African Christian Biography. Under her leadership, the Center for Global Christianity and Mission led the North American regional mission study for the Commission on World Mission and Evangelism of the World Council of Churches, which resulted in a 2022 report and the 2023 co-edited volume Creative Collaborations: Case Studies of North American Missional Practices.  In addition to STH, she is a faculty member in African Studies. Robert received her BA from Louisiana State University and her MA, MPhil, and PhD from Yale University.

RECENT VIDEOS AND INTERVIEWS:

“Constructing World Fellowship: Christian Practices and Insights from a Century Ago,” Robert Laidlaw Memorial Lecture, Knox College (Toronto), March 2021.

“Finding Fellowship: The Search for Transnational Christian Community in the 1920s,” conference plenary lecture, “Nationalism and Internationalism in the Young Ecumenical Movement, 1895-1920s,” co-sponsored by Boston University and Humboldt University (Berlin), October 2020.

Interview with Mark Hutchinson, contribution to a series on the vocation of history, summer 2020.

“The Discourse of World Christianity and Its Relationship to Mission Studies, 1910 to Present,” conference keynote address, “Global Christianities: Perspectives, Methods, and Challenges,” University of Chicago Divinity School, October 2019.

“Faithful Friendships in World Christianity,” keynote chapel address, and “Friendships and Faith,” afternoon lunch address and question & answer session, Global Mission Week, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, October 2019.

“Naming ‘World Christianity’: The Yale-Edinburgh Conference in Historical Perspective,” Yale-Edinburgh Group on World Christianity and the History of Mission, Yale Divinity School, June 2019.

Featured lecture, Florida Conference of the United Methodist Church, Annual Meeting 2019.

Sprunt Lecture Series, “Cross-Cultural Friendship and Christian Mission: History and Practices,” Union Theological Seminary, 2017.